Is there a crisis?/ Surprisingly, given the centrality of wages to the book’s premise, Lind offers little evidence there is a low-wages crisis. He gives unsourced figures on the growth in labor earnings at various points in the income distribution over the past 40 years: Earnings at the 95th percentile increased 63.2 percent, while earnings at the 50th percentile increased 15.1 percent, and the 10th percentile increased just 3.3 percent. It bears noting, though, that those are earnings, not wages, and earnings are a function of both the hourly pay rate and the number of hours worked. So, these data alone are not sufficient to show a problem with wages.

Lind later cites the nationalist think tank American Compass’s Cost-of-Thriving Index (COTI), which estimates the amount of time each year that a typical employee must work to provide a family of four a middle-class standard of living. That time increased from 30 weeks to 53 for male workers and from 45 to 66 for female workers between 1985 and 2018 according to COTI. But there’s reason to question those numbers. Winship and Horpedahl (2023) show that COTI’s methodology is inadequate and a proper analysis finds that earnings have increased substantially since the mid-1980s. Likewise, economist Mark Perry regularly reports Census Bureau data on the shares of households in various earnings brackets, and his numbers indicate that, from 1967 to 2023, the percentage of families earning more than $100,000 has more than tripled, while the shares of people earning below $35,000 or between $35,000 and $100,000 (all in 2023 dollars) have fallen by about a third. Thus, people seem to be moving up the income ladder, and Lind’s central premise is questionable if not just plain wrong.

Labor’s bargaining power/​ Putting those concerns aside, if we accept his premise that low wages ail modern America, then we might expect him to discuss how poorly performing schools, particularly in major cities, harm human capital, and other reasons that some workers have low earning power. However, he says the idea that workers’ pay reflects their human capital is “the big lie” (title of chapter 1) because determining each worker’s marginal revenue product (MRP) in a large multinational corporation “can’t be done.” Lind is correct that disentangling workers’ contributions in large organizations is more complicated than basic economic models suggest, but that doesn’t mean that workers’ wages are arbitrarily determined. Workers who can generate MRPs greatly above their current pay have a strong motivation—a possible pay hike—to seek other employment. Likewise, one rarely if ever encounters a lawyer manning the French fry station at a fast-food joint or a high school dropout as CEO of a large corporation. Human capital, it seems, is reflected in wages.

Having dismissed human capital as the basis for earnings, Lind posits that wages are determined by labor’s bargaining power. It’s unfortunate that he sees human capital and bargaining as competing theories because they are not mutually exclusive. On one hand, workers with greater potential productivity may well have more bargaining power, but on the other hand there is some evidence that pay is partly determined by bargaining. Regardless, Lind’s contention sets the stage for four chapters outlining ways in which workers’ bargaining power has supposedly been destroyed since the early 1980s.

The first two of these chapters deal with domestic business practices. One discusses declining private sector unionization, with emphasis on employers’ use of specialized law firms and consultants to avoid becoming unionized. (Presumably, unions also use specialized people to assist their organizing efforts, but Lind makes no mention of that.) The second chapter deals with employment practices such as non-compete clauses and treating workers as contractors rather than employees. Here, he recounts some interesting information about collusive “no poach” agreements among some tech firms and some fast-food companies. There’s no doubt that firms sometimes use sharp-elbowed employment practices, but he offers no evidence to indicate the aggregate effect of such tactics is large.

The other two chapters focus on what Lind calls “global labor arbitrage”: offshoring production (e.g., the “China shock”) and hiring immigrant labor. He cites a 1988 General Accounting Office study reporting several instances in which illegal immigrants harmed employment for American workers, but this evidence is far from definitive or current; several more recent papers show no net harm to native workers arising from changes in immigrant flows. Nowrasteh and Powell (2020) provide a more thorough literature review of the relationship between immigration and wages, and conclude by quoting a National Academy of Sciences review:

The impact of immigration on the wages of native-born workers overall is very small. To the extent that negative impacts occur, they are most likely to be found for prior immigrants or native-born workers who have not completed high school.

Government interventions/​ Lind then turns to what he calls the “anti-worker welfare state.” Here, I expected him to analyze how the phaseouts associated with means-tested assistance programs act as implicit taxes that trap workers in poverty. Instead, he focuses on people who are employed but have low enough incomes to remain eligible for some forms of welfare and cites figures that employees of Walmart and McDonald’s draw benefits such as food stamps and Medicaid totaling more than $1 billion per year. This idea appears in several other places in the book, yet Lind never considers that his preferred policy of requiring firms to pay “living” wages might lead to higher government outlays via disemployment effects. It may well be better for taxpayers to have companies employ workers at low wages rather than to have taxpayers fully support people priced out of jobs because of wage mandates. It may also be better for workers because some of those who gain experience at low wages will get promoted or become more attractive to other potential employers.

Lind follows with a chapter on occupational licensing and the overselling of college. This is the book’s best chapter, but it would have been even better if he had focused on licensing barriers confronting low-wage workers rather than dwelling on doctors and lawyers. As documented by Carpenter et al. (2017), licensing is widespread and burdensome for dozens of low-income occupations. As for colleges, Lind considers them to be a credentialing “arms race.” He adds that the demand for college degrees is partly an artifact of the Supreme Court’s 1971 Griggs v. Duke Power case prohibiting employment practices that are discriminatory in effect unless they are demonstrably related to job performance; college degrees apparently are a court-approved way to discriminate between candidates.

The remainder of the book’s chapters fall into two groups. One group focuses on how low-wage employment exacerbates some prominent social problems. For instance, Lind connects low wages with the declining US fertility rate. It’s certainly possible to see linkages between low-wage employment (or the choice to spend several years in college seeking credentials that lead to higher pay) and lower fertility, but he goes so far as to claim the United States is “uniquely bad” in paying low wages, yet fertility has fallen in most developed countries, some even more sharply than the United States. His attempts to tie wages to loneliness and political division are even less convincing. These chapters ignore other potential contributors to his selected social problems, such as how land use regulations damage housing affordability for young families and how anonymous social media forums coarsen public discourse.

Conclusion/​ The final chapters focus on Lind’s policy prescriptions. At this point, readers will have seen him use “neoliberal” as a pejorative dozens of times, and they will rightly not expect him to recommend more economic dynamism or better educational options. Instead, he hopes to achieve a “wage earner’s republic” by requiring living wages throughout the economy: Large employers would be subject to sectoral collective bargaining while small firms would be subject to wage boards. Lind also would expand social insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security while eliminating means-tested benefits. (He disregards existing social insurance programs’ financial woes.) He would also have a system of “national developmentalism” in which the government would engage in industrial policy and impose protective tariffs.

In sum, Lind misdiagnoses current economic conditions, provides weak connections between them and social problems such as low fertility and political division, and offers solutions that would do little to genuinely help workers who earn persistently low wages. His book argues many of the themes now trumpeted by the populist left and right, along with their flawed policy prescriptions.